I am a Ph.D. candidate at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). My advisor is Jiawei Han. Currently, I am visiting Princeton NLP Group, working with Danqi Chen. I am grateful for being supported by the Google PhD fellowship since 2021.

I will join the Computer Science Department at the University of Virginia (UVA) as an assistant professor in January 2024. I am looking for PhD students! Please send me an email with your CV and transcripts if you are interested in working with me (I will read all emails but I do apologize for not being able to respond to each of them)!

Research

I am broadly interested in the fields of natural language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), and data mining. I am especially passionate about the following research directions (with some past work as examples):

• Representation Learning in NLP:
  • [arXiv’23 Meng et al.] Representation Deficiency in Masked Language Modeling
  • [ICLR’22 Meng et al.] Pretraining Text Encoders with Adversarial Mixture of Training Signal Generators
  • [NeurIPS’21 Meng et al.] COCO-LM: Correcting and Contrasting Text Sequences for Language Model Pretraining
  • [NeurIPS’19 Meng et al.] Spherical Text Embedding
• Large Language Models for Few-Shot and Zero-Shot Learning:
  • [ICML’23 Meng et al.] Tuning Language Models as Training Data Generators for Augmentation-Enhanced Few-Shot Learning
  • [NeurIPS’22 Meng et al.] Generating Training Data with Language Models: Towards Zero-Shot Language Understanding
• Text Mining Paradigms and Applications:
  • [WWW’22 Meng et al.] Topic Discovery via Latent Space Clustering of Pretrained Language Model Representations
  • [EMNLP’20 Meng et al.] Text Classification Using Label Names Only: A Language Model Self-Training Approach
  • [CIKM’18 Meng et al.] Weakly-Supervised Neural Text Classification

News

• [2023.05] One paper on Weakly Supervised Scientific Text Classification has been accepted by KDD 2023!

• [2023.05] Two papers on Language Model Pretraining on Text-Rich Network and Retrieval-Enhanced Weakly-Supervised Text Classification have been accepted by ACL 2023 Main Conference/Findings!

• [2023.04] Our tutorial on Pretrained Language Representations for Text Understanding has been accepted by KDD 2023!

• [2023.04] One paper on Few-Shot Learning has been accepted by ICML 2023!

• [2023.01] Two papers on Metadata-Enhanced Scientific Text Classification and Unsupervised Online Story Discovery have been accepted by WWW 2023!

• [2023.01] One paper on Learning Text-Rich Network Representations has been accepted by ICLR 2023!

• [2022.12] Our tutorial on Turning Web-Scale Texts to Knowledge: Transferring Pretrained Representations to Text Mining Applications has been accepted by WWW 2023!

• [2022.10] Two papers on Seed-Guided Topic Discovery and Opion Summary have been accepted by WSDM 2023!

• [2022.09] One paper on Zero-Shot Language Understanding has been accepted by NeurIPS 2022!

Education

• Ph.D. (Expected 2023) in Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  Advisor: Prof. Jiawei Han

• M.S. (2019) in Computer Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  Advisor: Prof. Jiawei Han, [Thesis]

• B.S. (2017) in Computer Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  Graduated with Highest Honor & Bronze Tablet
  Advisor: Prof. Sayan Mitra

Contact

• Email: yumeng5[at]illinois[dot]edu

• Office: Room 1113, Thomas M. Siebel Center, 201 N. Goodwin Avenue, Urbana, IL 61801